Halpern, David. Social Capital (Polity Press, 2004).
Good discussion of social capital. Makes a very useful distinction among micro-, meso- and macro-level social capital and posits that social capital may achieve its effect by different causal pathways at the different levels.

Ahn, T.K., and Elinor Ostrom, eds.Foundations of Social Capital: A Reader (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2003).
See especially the introduction by Ahn and Ostrom, which is quite good, although it focuses overly on social capital as a vehicle to solve collective action problems, and not enough on the “private returns” to individuals from being in social networks.

Field, John. Social Capital (Routledge, 2004).
A good and readable summary of the concept of social capital, the ideas of 3 key social capital thinkers -- Bordieu, Coleman, and Putnam -- a distillation of the work showing the importance of social capital to education, economy and health, a discussion of the dark side of social capital and a discussion of social capital policy.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg." The New Yorker (January 11, 1999).
Article quite useful on the value of bridging social capital, although he refers to bridgers as "connectors." Only weakness is that he makes it sound like there are Herculean connectors, like Lois Weisberg, or non-connectors, when in reality even individuals who have only some bridging relationships are adding a lot of value. Discussion of this also found in Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

Better Together, The Report of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America.
2002 reprint of 2000 report, with new introduction; recommends strategies for re-engaging American communities. First thirdSecond thirdFinal third

Buchanan, Mark. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
Explains the conundrum of "small worlds" (how you can be a handful of social links away from millions or billions of others, but have most of your social friends be local). The book also describes the difference between egalitarian and aristocratic small worlds, and how small worlds pop up in very different scientific domains.

Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).
The book describes the emerging science of networks and how the structure of the network and the behavior of individuals of individuals in a network determine how the network is used and the benefits of the network. The book also tries to link the behavior of social networks to the spread of computer viruses, behavior of financial markets, etc.

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: The New Science of Networks (Perseus Publishing, 2002).
Describes the frequency of 'free-scale' (or power hub) networks across biological, technological and social networks where a few nodes (people, website, biological cells, etc.) are much more connected than all others. This develops because new nodes disproportionately link to the popular and high-value sites. Such power hub networks are less prone to disruption from random attacks (since only a few of the nodes are huge hubs) but much more fragile to targeted attacks on these hubs. It is unclear how much of these free-scale network findings relate to social networks since it is much easier to scale a WWW router to be 10x its current size than multiply the hours of socializing of an individual ten-fold. More work needs to be done to understand whether these free-scale networks are found outside of business and professional hierarchies (where hierarchies explain power laws) and outside of e-mail networks (where scale is costless). Moreover, it will be interesting to see whether individuals heavily linked to others are more or less respected by them, and understand the relationship between those with lots of strong network ties and those with lots of weak network ties.

Ball, Phillip. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004).
A look at the physics of community. What properties and laws can one observe about things like social networks, reciprocity, war, alliances, etc? The first section is heavy on physics, but we recommend chapters 9 and 13-18.

Csermely, Peter. Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks (Springer, 2006).
Csermely, a former Foggarty Fellow at Harvard, helps show how weak links (analogous to bridging ties) strengthen networks. His free-ranging examples span fruitflies, omnivores and herbivores, and the role of women in networks, but collectively he shows how weak links reduce the reliance and dependence on hubs in social networks.

Berry, Wendell. Jayber Crow (2001).
Recommended by Social Capital, Inc., this novel beautifully describes the importance of social connections in enriching the protagonist's life in a small Kentucky town.

MORE INFORMATION

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Other Sources

Information about social capital and the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey:

Our own Saguaro Seminar site
Provides overview of Professor Putnam’s work to date, as well as the historical Saguaro Seminar meetings, and has links to various other social capital research and publications (Bowling Alone, Better Together, Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey [SCCBS]).

www.bowlingalone.com
Through vast new data, Putnam’s book shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures and how we may reconnect.

www.bettertogether.org
Better Together is the Saguaro Seminar
report based on three years of dialogue
among a diverse group of thinkers and
doers. This report details promising
strategies and recommendations for
increasing our social capital through
faith-based efforts, schools and youth,
the workplace, politics, and the arts.

Social Capital Gateway
The Social Capital Gateway is a fine site on social capital worldwide, including recent books, theses, social capital events and conferences, and basic readings on social capital.